All you ever need to know about Harvesting in EverQuest II Updated for LiveUpdate 24
- maintained by Debillus

Introduction
Harvesting in EQ2 has a point to it. First of all You enable yourself to gather materials needed for tradeskilling, second of all You will need harvesting skills for serveral key quests (heritages among), and finaly You may get that rare harvest you need for your adept III spell, or simply to improve your ingame economy. Some rare's will sell for several plats.

Harvesting skills
As with all other skills harvesting skills progress by +5 for each level you gain, tradeskill or adventure - whatever is the highest determines.

The game currently has 7 tiers (1-7) each representing 50 skill levels, or 10 regular levels.

Tier 1 - Level 01-09 - Skill 0+ :: Isle of Refuge + City Zones
Tier 2 - Level 10-19 - Skill 20+ :: Antonica / Commonlands
Tier 3 - Level 20-29 - Skill 90+ :: Thundering Steppes / Nektulos Forest / Firemyst gully / Zavronn's Tower
Tier 4 - Level 30-39 - Skill 140+ :: Enchanted Lands / Zek the Orcish Wastes / Bloodskull Valley / Cove of Decay
Tier 5 - Level 40-50 - Skill 190+ :: Feerrott / Rivervale / Everfrost / Lavastorm
Tier 6 - Level 51-60 - Skill 240+ :: Sinking Sands / Pillars of Flame (Desert of Flames)
Tier 7 - Level 61-70 - Skill 250+ :: Realm of Twilight, Dawn and Night (Kingdom of Sky)

Note! Tier 2 originaly required skill-level 40 but it got lowered first to 30, then to 20 to make tradeskilling a bit easier. Similar Tier 7 got bumped from 290 to 250 a few days after Kingdom of Sky went live. Otherwise you can see the addition of 50 (10x5) between the tiers.

On merchants you may purchase equippable harvesting tools for the different methods of harvesting. When equipped (and used for their appropriate node) they add a skill bonus of +1.

Also, as of LiveUpdate 24, your local neighborhood Woodworker may equip you with special harvesting tools that reduces the time it takes to extract from a given node. You can leave the tools in one of your bags and simply drag them to a hotbar key. Pressing that key will auto-equip the harvesting tool for you.

Harvesting
You have the chance of extracting a minimum of 3 items from each node. The higher your skill, the higher the chance of not failing (finding nothing), but you should always get your 3 items, no matter how many times you have to retry. When you find a rare, you will be notified with a "TaDa" sound and a message telling you that you have found a rare item. As of LiveUpdate 24 you may extract several resouces in each attempt.

Each Tier has it's own set of resources. Allthough the nodes you harvest may be named very differently, they all contain the same resources. They can however all be categorized. Execpt for "a pile of bones" in Tier 2, which is actualy rare wood, all tiers follow these basic classifcations.

Light sources
Under rares we find the semi-rare "light source" ressources which can be used by various tradeskill classes to produce an imbued version of a pristine piece of armor, weapon or jewelry. All lightsource resources within a tier can be used for that given tiers imbued recipies. As of LU24 light sources are used directly in the final recipies, hence you do no longer require the need of an alchemist to make an extract.

Ommisions
The node categories for fish, shrubberies (natural gardens) and fungi (herb gardens) has been ommited since they don't contain any regular rares and only the provisioner/alchemist uses them. All of these, however still has a chance to drop a light source item.

Locations
For the old-world zones nodes will spawn in designated areas of the zone. From Desert of Flames (Tier 6) and for future expansions, particular nodes will only spawn in designated areas. For the smaller zones (city and instanced zones) of the old world the rule is pretty much "all over the place".